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Zynga begins game closures with FishVille and Treasure Isle

Zynga will close Treasure Isle and FishVille on December 5, kicking off an extensive cost-cutting process that will terminate 13 of the company's titles.

At present, FishVille has 730,000 MAUs and 70,000 DAUs, which are relatively high for a game that launched in 2009. At its highest, however, the game attracted 7.45 million DAUs. Treasure Isle has 540,000 MAUs and 80,000 DAUs.

The latest development in Zynga's ongoing problems was announced during Apple's iPad Mini launch event on October 23. The company's Boston studio will be closed, its workforce in Austin has been reduced, and its studios in the UK and Japan are under threat. In total, redundancies are expected to comprise 5 per cent of the company's total workforce.

In addition to closing games and layoffs, streamlining measures will take place throughout the company to increase efficiency and improve resource management.

I can understand why you'd stop supporting older titles with new content once they drop below a certain level, but are the running costs that high or the revenue per user on remaining players so low that it's really not economical to keep servers running for a game that's still played by over half a million people with a daily audience of almost 100,000? That suggests something's badly wrong with Zynga's business model and/or the scalability of their tech.

Not to mention the bad will it's going to generate when those hundreds of thousands of players suddenly find all their time and money investment in the game over the last three years has vanished into the ether with only a month's notice. Given how much Zynga relies on shuffling users between games, it might make them think twice before spending money or dedicating that much time to another title.

In these cases, especially when there are no super advanced technologies involved, open source might be a solution.
I recently tried to play Civilization 2 only to find out it's impossible to run on Wine or on Windows Vista. It's a shame I don't have the source code, I'd gladly port it to some modern platform in my spare time. I'm sure many Zynga fans would find the means to run a server and keep a few popular games alive. But then if the model is "shut down the old game so that everybody must buy the new one" I guess my idea of videogames is completely wrong.

Has no one bothered to consider that to the consumer, the money they spent on their game is in thin air now? The consumer will eventually figure this out, and stick to tangible products in the future if at all possible. If I was a user of these games, their plug-pulling would infuriate me.

This isn't the same as playing an arcade game, where you get one quick play. These are built worlds. Imagine if someone built a Lego city out of, say, Star Wars blocks. Then the Lego Group came along and said "we've discontinued this set, we're taking it away now".

@Christopher - Didn't Tabula Rasa, TOR, City of Heroes, Champions Online, SWG, or any other MMO teach you that? Make sure you like what remains when the servers are down, and the aftertaste from the pittance spent on these diversions is less bitter.